Kademlia DHT Implementation for Decentralized Messaging

Abstract

This paper describes the implementation of Kademlia DHT (Distributed Hash Table) for ZKIM, a decentralized messaging platform. The implementation covers XOR-based distance metrics, peer discovery and routing, username resolution (ZNRS), and message indexing. Unlike traditional Kademlia implementations that require bootstrap nodes, our implementation supports bootstrap-free discovery through iterative lookup and last-known peer fallback mechanisms. We describe the architecture, implementation details, and performance characteristics of the Kademlia DHT implementation, demonstrating its effectiveness in production deployments. The system achieves efficient peer discovery through XOR-based routing, supports username resolution through ZNRS (ZKIM Name Resolution Service), and provides message indexing for decentralized messaging. Performance evaluation demonstrates efficient routing and discovery operations while maintaining strong security guarantees through Ed25519 signatures and BLAKE3 hashing.